How can you own numbers? Numbers belong to the world.

My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine.

Always remember, however, that there’s usually a simpler and better way to do something than the first way that pops into your head.

Programming is legitimate and necessary academic endeavour.

The manuals we got from IBM would show examples of programs and I knew I could do a heck of a lot better than that. So I thought I might have some talent.

The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.

People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.